Kind Are Her Answers (22 page)

“Rollo? He isn’t superior, he just enjoys the comic side. He’d go mad in a job like his if he didn’t.”

Kit recalled, with annoyance, Rollo’s cool and roving stare; his imagination added a shade of insolence absent from the original.

“He likes you, too,” Christie said. “He wanted to get you in for the play. He was awfully disappointed when I said you wouldn’t be able to. It was St. Michael he wanted you for; you’d have looked perfect, he said.”

“Oh. Well, I’m sorry to have done him out of a laugh.”

The American ladies paid their bill and went, leaving behind them privacy and peace. But neither of the beneficiaries were made happy by it. Christie’s soft sparkle had gone; her face had a compact look which made her seem suddenly older.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You can’t just invent things about people you’ve hardly seen. Rollo isn’t a bit like that, I’ve known him for years.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were so intimate that you couldn’t discuss him.”

“Of course I could discuss him. You don’t want to discuss him. You’ve got some fixed idea of your own and you don’t want to listen to anything else. You’re talking just like Maurice did.”

“Thanks,” said Kit, hurt as one can only be hurt by a blow on a surface already raw. “It seems quite a pity you had all the trouble of changing over. However, there’s always Rollo, I suppose.”

“Oh, Kit, stop being so
maddening
or I’ll throw a plate at you.”

They confronted one another, with set faces, across the table.

Behind the hard surface of Kit’s anger a tiny voice made itself heard, reminding him of the moment of release from Janet, the happy rediscovery of solitude. Sickened, even a little frightened, by the violence within him and its wasteful stupidity, for the first time he regretted the freedom which had slipped so imperceptibly away. Something of it must have showed in his face, for the surface flurry of Christie’s temper dispersed in sudden fear. She leaned across the table and caught his hand.

“Darling, don’t. I love you, you know I do.”

“I’m sorry.” The anxiety in her voice, the return of dependence, slid him back into security. They exchanged uncertain smiles, then laughed. Somewhere, distantly, the still small voice that had spoken to him out of the whirlwind still sounded; but he let it fade.

“Fancy being jealous of old Rollo,” Christie said.

“I’m jealous of any one who sees you every day.”

“Honestly I believe you thought Roll made love to me.”

“He’s a bigger fool than he looks if he doesn’t try.”

“Rollo—!” She laughed delightedly. “My dear, if you tucked Rollo in bed with me and locked the door, he’d just go on till midnight telling me how he’d like to produce
Hamlet,
and fall asleep talking. Honestly. It always amazes me that he can do love scenes as well as he does on the stage; I’ve never seen him look at a woman off it. Fancy picking on old Rollo.” She stroked the back of his hand with the tips of her fingers. “No, if I hadn’t you, I expect I’d cast an eye at the man we’ve got now playing Satan. He’s new this year. Rather lovely, black-and-white and haggard with a voice like a passing-bell. When he comes on and says, ‘How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning,’ it’s like water running down your spine. He’s unhappy, I think.”

“Don’t tease me. We’ve only got three more hours.”

“Oh, darling, I wasn’t. I was only talking off the top; I can’t help talking to you as if I were talking to myself. I’ve hardly spoken to him. Kit, darling, you weren’t really unhappy about Rollo, were you? I can’t bear to think of you being unhappy about me when you’re alone. I want to make you only happy. Don’t you see, that’s what I’m
for,
for you?”

She took his hand in both hers; her face glowed as if a deep light shone behind it. There was a hard tightness round Kit’s heart.

“If you—” he began.

The waiter came in, and began to clear the things from the other table. They each pulled their hands back and sat with them fixed stiffly on their knees. Presently Kit beckoned him over, and paid the bill.

“Thank you very much, sir,” said the waiter, finding half a handful of small silver pushed blindly back at him.

“Where shall we go, darling?” asked Christie when he had gone.

“Anywhere by ourselves. In the car somewhere?”

“Yes,” said Christie. “Please.”

Kit was happy for the next three or four days. It was an obstinate, enclosed kind of happiness, a little like the pleasure of hugging a fire in winter, when a disregarded voice tells one that a better kind of warmth is to be had by walking in the frost outside. But Kit hugged his fire. He wrote to Christie, and got back, two days later, a letter overflowing with expressions of love. There was hardly room in it for anything else, even for her usual report on the progress of the play. He read it over many times, and kept it to read again; but when he returned to it, it was always with a fear at the bottom of his heart of finding something different between the lines. He never did, and put it away comforted. But some undertone in it—not insincerity, but rather a kind of overanxiety and solicitude—would send him back to it in the same disquiet again.

By the next time he went over it was mid-December; the last chance he was likely to have until after Christmas. The day beforehand he walked about the lighted shop windows, looking for something to give to Christie. There were several things he fancied—a little moleskin jacket, a gold watch the size of a sixpenny bit—which somehow he was shy of. They had a kind of hackneyed suggestion, were in fact what Christie would call mistresslike. She was liable to sudden and illogical fits of embarrassment about such things. In the end he found, almost by accident, something exactly right; a box for theatrical make-up, large and flat and businesslike, enamelled pale green and full of flaps and drawers and unfolding mirrors and trays, unspillable compartments for powder of every shade, round pots for grease, thin slots for eye-pencil and thick slots for greasepaint. He had them all filled with the appropriate things, and, in secret that night in his room, unwrapped it and opened up all its lids and hinges and flaps and drawers; picking up the bright clean sticks of greasepaint with their gilt labels and cellophane covers, peering in gingerly at the powders (he was astonished to find that one was green), and imagining Christie’s face looking back at him from the mirror in the lid. The only unfilled part was a large compartment in the bottom, for trinkets and oddments. He grinned to himself as he imagined the kind of thing with which Christie would fill it.

He enjoyed himself so much with this toy that, by the time he started for the Abbey, all his vague uneasiness had blown away. It sat on the seat of the car beside him, and had already a companionable air, like something she had worn. There was a sharp nip in the wind, and a frosty sun; a glassy-clear light like yellow crystal picked out bare trees and the sharp furrows of the ploughland; he sang to himself along the empty stretches of the road.

Christie met him at the Abbey gate, dressed for the cold; she had on a bright green hood of soft leather lined with fleece, and gloves to match. Her hair, escaping round the hood, shone like a smoky sunset, and her cheeks were pink with the frost. She got into the car (Kit had hidden his parcel under the dashboard), and looked up to say, with a little sigh, “Oh, Kit, how
nice
you always are to see again.”

She looked, to Kit, so lovely that he felt incapable of talking about it. “Where would you like to go?” he asked. “Shall we drive out somewhere?”

“Let’s go on the hills. I’ve been quite
sore
with wanting to be out all day.”

They drove west, away from the town, between beeches whose fallen leaves made a red border to the road, and up beyond them to the bare hills. Here only Scotch firs and tamarisk grew, licked sideways by the upper wind which, leaping the levels, came at them with strength still unbroken from the sea. The short sullen grass between the stone fences seemed to suck in the sunlight and mix it with the water in their roots. The clouds were frail and transparent, and the wind tore them and streaked their rags along the thin blue of the sky.

Christie was very gay. She talked incessantly, telling Kit anecdotes about the Abbey—which seemed to grow a fresh crop, like exotic fungi, every week—and getting Kit to tell her stories in exchange. She had an inexhaustible memory for characters, and he brought her all the tales about odd contacts in his practice to which Janet had listened, in the days when he still tried to amuse her, with strained politeness. Even when the joke depended on a technical point, she was quick to take it up from his simplified explanation. She had a kind of unsophisticated shrewdness like that of an intelligent child who has been much with its elders; nothing he said to her fell with the dead drop which marks the gulf between personalities.

On a bare stretch of hill they got out and walked, enjoying the last of the sun which sparkled through the thin air like bubbles in wine. The wind was so strong that the struggle to walk against it made them hot in spite of its coldness; Christie clutched his hand and he had a fancy that she needed his weight to hold her down to the ground. Just before it was time to turn back, they stood in a clump of firs and looked at the light slanting along the lionlike flanks of the hills. Kit watched the skyline, content with himself and the world; at rest in the present and without demands on the future. After a minute or two he turned to look at Christie, expecting to see his thoughts reflected in her face as, all afternoon, his other thoughts had been. She was looking not at the golden grass but at him; her face was strained with compassion and, it seemed, with fear. His exaltation left him, he became suddenly aware that the sun was setting coldly and that the blue of twilight was creeping up from the valleys.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

She squeezed his arm quickly. “Nothing, darling. I’m getting hungry, aren’t you? Let’s go somewhere and have a nice cup of tea.”

There was a big farmhouse standing back, in a smooth garden, from the road; a famous place in summer, but hibernating sleepily now in the shelter of a ridge of pines.

“Let’s go there,” Kit said. “It looks peaceful.”

“It looks as if it was closed for the winter, to me.”

They were made welcome, however, with cordial surprise, put into a plushy parlour with a Georgian brass kerb and a log fire, and served with toasted scones, bread-and-butter both currant and plain, two kinds of jam, and a towering home-made cake. They both ate a good deal, but Christie found time to chatter with even more animation than before. Kit said very little; he looked at Christie, drank tea from a thick white cup with a gold clover-left in the bottom, and laughed when required. The farmer’s wife, who had things to do in the back kitchen, left them to themselves.

At the end of the meal Kit said, “Wait here for me. I’ve got something outside in the car.” He brought back the parcel with the make-up box, and put it on her knee.

“What’s this?” she asked, fingering the string as if she were frightened of it. “Is it for me?”

“You ought to have had it at Christmas. But I shan’t be here.”

“Kit, what have you been doing?” She pressed the other hand, unconsciously, against her heart.

“Open it,” said Kit happily. “It won’t bite you.”

“No, but darling, I—” She turned and smiled at him quickly, cleared a space on the table, undid the string and paper, caught her breath and opened the green enamel lid of the box. Kit, standing behind her, saw her face framed, just as he had imagined it, in the mirror inside the lid.

“Oh,
Kit.”
She opened the folding trays, lifted out the sticks of make-up and put them reverently back again, dipped her finger in the powder and made a little smooth dent. “It’s lovely—I—” Suddenly she turned from the treasures in front of her as if she had forgotten them, and looked up at his face. His hands were resting on the back of the chair; she pressed her cheek against his arm. “Oh, God,” she said, “why do you have to be so sweet?” Her voice broke on a quick violent sob; he could see its passage through her lifted throat. She flung herself forward, her elbows on the table, her head in her hands. Her hair fell down over the bright sticks of greasepaint and the green enamel edges of the box.

“What is it?” Kit smoothed the loose hair back against her cheeks, and tilted up her chin. “Don’t be silly,” he said softly.

“I’m not being silly.” She shook his hands off and turned away. “You don’t know what I’m like or you wouldn’t be good to me like this.”

“Of course I know what you’re like.”

She went on, her voice muffled and indistinct through her hands, “I had a feeling you were going to do something like this. I kept thinking if it was something bitchy you’d brought me, jewellery or something, I wouldn’t feel so awful. But it’s even more like you than I was afraid it’d be. I wish I’d jumped into that quarry we passed just now.” Even in her grief, youth and vitality ran in her voice like water. He knew she had never imagined death for herself in all her life, and smiled.

“What
is
all this?” He pulled gently at one of her ears, through her hair.

“You’re so’ good. You’re always the same. Don’t you see, I’m not. I’m different whoever I’m with. And I don’t want to be. I only want to be the sort of person I am with you. Oh, Kit, why do you have to be away from me?”

“God knows why. Something I did wrong in a former life, I daresay. I never am away from you, really.”

“But I’ve been away from you.”

“How do you mean?” said Kit. He drew away from the chair and stepped back, so that the brass fender almost tripped him. He steadied himself with an arm on the edge of the mantelpiece. At the sound of his heel against the brass Christie started round in her chair, and looked at him with wet frightened eyes.

“Kit,
don’t.
I can’t bear it.” She jumped up and caught his other arm between her hands. “Nothing’s happened really. It all seems so senseless now you’re here.”

“What exactly has happened?” He felt the plush fringe of the mantelpiece give dangerously in his fingers, and loosened their grip.